Insight: Will Synapse’s Partnership with Biometrax Provide the Ultimate Deterrent to Shoplifters?

25th May 2018

With most constabularies in the UK unable to respond to shoplifting incidents due to a lack of resources, and theft in stores increasing, retailers are faced with the dilemma of either spending more on security or losing more stock. It’s a tough decision when the UK retail market already needs to save as much as possible.

Prolific shoplifters know that the police won’t normally respond to a report of shoplifting when the value falls below a certain threshold. According to recent reports, this value is approximately £200 per incident. By committing offences within this threshold, a shoplifter can steal considerable amounts without ever having any form of criminal record, allowing them to continue on their rounds of different retailers up and down the country.

There are a number of business and retail crime platforms out there that share information about offenders, but often there are key pieces of information missing. Images can be fuzzy and, because experienced shoplifters seldom carry identification, it is very difficult to get an accurate identification of the offender. This makes it very difficult to track multiple thefts in different locations by the same offender.

Synapse was approached by Biometrax, a new innovation for fingerprint scanning solutions, to partner and integrate fingerprint scanning technology with the existing Synapse app platform. This integration will provide a fingerprint record of each individual offender when detained and real-time searching of an offender database as a key USP.

The Synapse platform is already on the forefront of security incident reporting, through innovative solutions that help businesses monitor the activity within their stores and gain actionable insights into mitigating risks. Through our partnership with Biometrax, Synapse will have the ability to provide an elevated level of information to retailers that’s not available anywhere else.

The Biometrax scanning solution will not be used for suspected offenders. Once an offender is detained, in the circumstances where previously the police would be called, their information will be securely recorded on the Synapse system. This includes the name and address they provide, an image, and a fingerprint scan to serve as a unique identifier. This will create a record of previous offences against the individual to aid with the issuing of Civil Recovery fines.

As each offender is uploaded to the system, any subscribed retailer within a defined radius will receive an instant notification of the addition to allow them to deter the individual from stealing from them. As part of the notification, high level details of previous offences will be shared. If the offender goes outside that radius and commits an offence, the retailers in that area will then be notified and will be able to see previous offences for that individual in other areas.

Once launched, all constabularies in the UK will be granted free access to the app which will allow different constabularies to work more collaboratively when dealing with serial ‘threshold shoplifters’, whether they are individuals or organised gangs.

The launch is set for summer 2018 with a pilot scheme in Greater London. Synapse are interested in speaking to retailers who are suffering high losses and regularly catch shoplifters to take part in the pilot. Contact us today at synapse.bi

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